A Family Secret Revealed -- Black Ministers Condemned

Blues singers and old folks call it "graveyard love," but it really isn't "love" at all. It’s about the extent one person will go to in order to exert control over another in a relationship. It’s also about that point in a soured relationship when mental coercion and domestic violence no longer works … and the situation turns deadly. I know, I was almost at that point of no return in a relationship close to 40 years ago.

Most marriages break up over money, but ours was different. After getting married to Christine at age 17 (I used to joke that while I was 17, she was actually 17 going on 40) due to her being six months pregnant, we assumed the roles of adults. At age 18, I left my parents’ house with a wife and daughter, Alyson — a son, Alan, would be born almost two years later — and we became, by all outward appearances, a successful, happy, well-adjusted family.

I’d gotten a decent job at the electric power company and my wife finished high school and became a registered nurse who worked in operating rooms. Virtually everyone who worked with her said that she was so good at her profession that she should go back to school and become a doctor. Merely in our early 20s, life was so good that we were contemplating building a summer home by a lake.

However, there was one fly in the ointment. As I belatedly matured, I realized that our relationship was out of kilter; I realized that I actually was no more than a mere third child in our house. The word for it is pussy-whipped. I attempted to renegotiate the terms of our marriage, but Christine was having none of it: I’d been asleep for the previous eight years, and she firmly informed me — in no uncertain terms — that things would stay exactly the way they were between us. But they didn’t — they couldn’t. Upon my belated awakening, I simply had to become a man.

After over two years of marriage counseling, the psychiatrist, a splendid man that we had both come to admire deeply, informed us that he had violated one of the cardinal rules of his profession and had allowed himself to get too personally involved in our case — he would have to withdraw. On our way out the door of his office for the last time, with Christine walking ahead of me, he tugged at my sleeve and whispered in my ear, “You have to leave, it will never work.” I’d suspected for some time the veracity of what he told me, but leaving was far easier said than done; there were two children involved that I loved deeply.

Christine had been raised by a deeply religious, often violent mother who had 10 other children and two or three ex-husbands. As our relationship deteriorated she began to try to maintain control in the only way she knew: By hitting, by becoming violent. I would grab her arms to stop her, almost laughing sometimes because I was so much more physically stronger than her due to the hard construction work I’d been doing to earn a pretty good living. Then she bought a gun. The last straw came after one of our increasingly frequent arguments. The prior day, the school bus had been late in bringing Alyson home due to a heavy snow fall, and Christine wanted me to delay leaving for work and go out with her while she told off the bus driver for being late. I sort of laughed at her dismissively as I headed down the stairs. She came storming out the bedroom behind me, gun in hand, and knocked me down the three or four remaining stairs. She tripped and virtually fell on top of me, the gun flying out of her hand.

When I finally came to my senses I was on top of her, my hands around her throat, her being very near death’s door. I vividly recall thinking, “Oh my God, I don’t love this woman this much.” I took the gun out of the house with me and gave it to my father for safekeeping, but she simply bought another one. Within the month I’d moved out; had I stayed, one of us would have most certainly died.

Fast-forward seven years. I was living in Manhattan, trying my hand at becoming a thespian full time, and hustling around town in the lucrative street life the rest of the time. Christine called me and said there was a “problem” with Alan, who by then was 13. I asked her what it was and she cryptically said, “Have him come up there, and you’ll see for yourself.”

A few weeks later Alan arrived, and physically he looked just fine to me. However, it was obvious that he was discovering his sexuality, and that he was going to be gay. There was no mistaking it, and he wasn’t trying to hide the fact. I called Christine and said, “Yeah, I see what you mean.” Her response was, “I’m not having it, I’m not having no son of mine becoming a fag.” The words were hurtful; after all, she was a medical professional, and this was our son she was talking about.

I informed her if that was how she felt then I’d have him come and live with me, no problem. This was something I’d always wanted anyway, but she previously would never have agreed to it — that would be too much like me “winning.”

I knew that I’d have to clean up my lifestyle a bit, quit living with the strippers and whores like I’d been doing for years, and get a separate apartment for the both of us, but I could financially handle it — money wasn’t a problem. He would be out of school by summer, and I told her I’ve have everything ready for the move by then.

Her answer was, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him.” My ex-wife had a history of vacillating where I and my children were concerned, so I sent Alan back to Cleveland and to his mother, still intent on making a place for him in my life in New York City come summer.

I’m not a medical professional, but I was told that as long as the flu virus is in the lungs it’s relatively innocuous, but in the very rare cases when it leaves the lungs it can attack the heart and mimic a heart attack. My son Alan died of such a heart attack at age 13, on Saint Valentine’s Day, 1976.

At the graveyard, after Alan’s body was lowered into the ground, Christine came over to me, took my hands gently in hers, looked me squarely in the eyes, and whispered in my ear, “I told you that I’d take care of it. You do know that this is the best way, don’t you? God really doesn’t approve of fags.”

I stood there at his gravesite long afterwards; stunned, rooted in place in the damp, chill February air. I don’t know how long I remained there, but it was long after everyone else had departed. Was Christine telling the truth, or was she lying, playing one final, brutal game of one-upmanship on me? Eventually, when I was able to move, I went to the airport and caught the first flight back to New York … where I drowned my trauma, grief and sorrow in fifths of Remy Martin for the next two years.

Christine died in 2005, and I only reveal this family secret now so that when I take up my pen and rail against those black ministers who, by attempting to roll back Cleveland’s domestic partner registry, are saying something was wrong with my son, they will know why I’m not going to leave them any place to hide…not in their pulpits nor behind their Bibles. I’m going to fight them tooth, nail, and claw to change the poisoned climate that lead to his death. I owe at least this much to the memory of my beautiful son Alan.

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com.

Frazier's book From Behind the Wall: on Crime, Punishment, Race, and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is now available again in hardback format from the author. Details at http://www.frombehindthewall.com.
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